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June, 1995. I’m sitting cross-legged on a thick plastic gym mat in a basement conference room at Davies Hospital within the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. The AIDS crisis is raging and that is an epicenter. The floors above us are populated by individuals with HIV, a disease that targeted gay men—including so a lot of my friends. I ache. But yoga had saved me from the deep grief and despair that I had plunged into. I think it could possibly help. Now, I’m about to show my first yoga class for individuals with HIV/AIDS.

I had just finished my 200-hour yoga teacher training a month earlier. My heart is pounding so loudly I worry that my students will have the opportunity to listen to it. Unfortunately, what they may hear as a substitute are voices over the hospital loudspeaker. Every from time to time we’re startled by, “Code Blue! Code Blue!” which implies that somebody is having a life-threatening emergency on the floors above us.

The dirty gray carpet is roofed with stains and the room smells like hospital food because the cafeteria is round the corner. I’ve moved the tables and chairs to 1 side of the room to create space for a small group of scholars who’re slowly arriving. The ground is scattered with gym mats and hospital pillows. One student comes as much as me and says he can’t sit on the ground.  He knows he won’t have the opportunity to get back up.

Other students have different physical challenges. One has a type of neuropathy that causes numbness in his feet so he can’t balance on one leg. One other, who is incredibly thin, tells me that he has extreme fatigue.

Impulsively I feel inadequate and unprepared. How am I going to make this work for them? What in my 200-hour yoga training has prepared me for this moment?

Are We Teaching With the Right Intention?

I do know I had the proper intention, but I didn’t have all the sensible teaching skills I actually needed to make the impact I had hoped for. I wasn’t sure tips on how to make the experience effective for all the scholars who got here to class that day.

Even before starting my 200-hour training, I had the incredible luck of spending 4 years apprenticing with a masterful yoga teacher, Kazuko Onodera. I spent days along with her—practicing yoga, studying philosophy, gardening, and cooking. It was a profound yoga education.

As a frontline AIDS activist with a gaggle called ACT UP, I had also done countless trainings on anti-racism and community-building. I appreciated all of it, and I felt stuffed with yoga knowledge. But my knowledge, good intentions, and appreciation of the practice weren’t enough. The thing is, I didn’t have adequate tools to share it with others. My yoga teacher training hadn’t prepared me to show real individuals with real bodies and real problems. Even after the deep yoga apprenticeship, my 200-hour yoga teacher training still felt like drinking from a firehose.

The Training Yoga Teachers Need

There have been two specific areas where I felt I used to be lacking in my teaching skills. One was in adapting the practices for all my students. The opposite was in my ability to serve all of them at the identical time.

After that top quality within the hospital basement, I spotted I needed more training to learn tips on how to make my teaching accessible to everyone. I discovered opportunities to help a lot of expert and experienced teachers, but ultimately I spotted I had to seek out my very own technique to teach. The challenge was finding the boldness to interrupt out of old pondering. I desired to respect the tradition I used to be a part of, but I also wanted to actually serve the scholars who got here to me.

Through the years, I discovered ways to think more creatively and teach each yoga practice as a spectrum of possibility. I developed specific techniques for teaching truly mixed-level classes where students with different abilities and disabilities can practice together. These are skills that I wish someone had shared with me before I stepped into that top quality.

Bending from Anger to Motion

October, 2016. I’m standing in front of a number of hundred individuals who have gathered for the second annual Accessible Yoga Conference on the Santa Barbara Yoga Center in California. It’s unbearably hot and there is no such thing as a air-con. We’ve come to the last session of the conference, and I open the ground to comments and questions. I’m exhausted from running the conference and able to go home.

However the energy within the room is electrical. Over the noise of the fans, people start sharing their frustration, and even anger, on the yoga world for excluding them. Person after person shares their stories of how they’ve been omitted of up to date yoga.

A disabled person describes being told they were too slow to maintain up with the category, in order that they should stop coming. Another person describes the shame they felt when their teacher told them that in the event that they lost weight they might do the poses more easily. Almost everyone within the room has a painful story. It’s like I’ve opened a valve and all these strong emotions start pouring out.

Finally, the conversation turned to the indisputable fact that most teachers weren’t being trained to make their classes accessible, and the way much profit could come from more emphasis on accessibility in teacher training programs. We discussed Yoga Alliance standards for 200-hour yoga teacher training programs. Their basic requirements for the way teacher trainings are run include a minimum variety of hours of instruction in certain areas of study. But they didn’t call for any specific training around making yoga accessible. In reality it wasn’t required anywhere. We agreed that needed to alter.

Advocating For Inclusion

Out of the discussion that day, we formed an Accessible Yoga Advocacy Team. Our first task: to petition Yoga Alliance for change. Amazingly, it appeared to work. The subsequent spring, YA launched a latest initiative to update standards for 200-hour yoga teacher trainings. I find yourself on a committee focused on making a revised Code of Conduct. The , instituted in early 2020, includes powerful language around diversity and inclusion:

Under Code Principle 6, Members MUST NOT discriminate against and SHOULD actively include all individuals. Members are expected to transcend basic legal prohibitions against discrimination and, inside their scope of practice, actively include, accommodate, and welcome all who want to be included within the practice of yoga.

It goes on to say members must not discriminate against anyone “on the premise of age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, culture, national origin, religion, body type, personal appearance, physical or mental ability, socioeconomic status, marital status, political activities, or affiliation or some other basis.” It says members should actively include and welcome people who find themselves typically excluded, and supply accommodations for individuals with disabilities, considering safety and accessibility.

The language was clear and forceful. (Even those capitalizations are within the code.) I really like the concept of lively inclusion, and I used to be impressed with Yoga Alliance for taking such a powerful stance on this regard. With renewed hope for contemporary yoga, I imagined a world where all yoga was accessible, and where individuals who had been excluded can be welcomed in all yoga spaces.

Waiting for the dream

Today, 2022:  A few years after its implementation, I’m still waiting for that dream to materialize. We’re still seeing ableism, racism, fatphobia, and so many other types of prejudice throughout the yoga world. I’m wondering if YA registered teachers and schools are conscious of what they’re agreeing to once they click that little box that claims they may abide by the Code of Conduct? How do they interpret the commitment to “actively include, accommodate, and welcome all who want to be included within the practice of yoga?” How can they put it into practice?

I’m unsure if the updated 200-hour standards have made any substantial improvement on this aspect of yoga teaching. Within the strategy of creating an Accessible Yoga teacher training, I’ve been deep in contemplation about what a starting yoga teacher must know. After they complete a typical 200-hour teacher training, are yoga teachers capable of share yoga with all their students? Could they teach a mixed-level class where there are disabled people, older people, fat people—real individuals who each have individual needs and talents?

Unfortunately, I believe not. We now have the lofty goal of lively inclusion, but most teachers who complete basic teacher training will lack the abilities to make that goal a reality. This disconnect creates a dangerous gap that many students fall through. A niche full of students who think, “I’m not flexible enough to do yoga.” “I’m not young enough to do yoga.” “I’m not skinny enough to do yoga.” And worst of all, “I got injured in yoga, so it’s not for me.”

It seems as if yoga teacher trainings devote little time to teaching skills and methodology that will allow latest teachers to quickly change into proficient in making yoga truly accessible and welcoming to everyone.

I don’t see the standards addressing the problem of tips on how to acquire the sensible skills that teachers need to meet the high calling of that Code of Conduct. So, it comes right down to us. It’s the duty of each yoga teacher and yoga school to reflect on the powerful words within the Code of Conduct, and ask ourselves if we’re doing all we are able to to actively include anyone who’s occupied with the practice of yoga.

Jivana Heyman is the founder and director of Accessible Yoga, and the creator of Accessible Yoga: Poses and Practices for Every Body and Yoga Revolution: Constructing a Practice of Courage and Compassion